Gitcoin Grants 22 (GG22) OSS Eligibility Criteria

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Gitcoin Grants 22 (GG22) OSS Eligibility Criteria

Introduction

Gitcoin and our partners are collaborating to support the growth and development of the Open Source Software (OSS) ecosystem through a series of quadratic funding rounds. These rounds will allocate funds to support contributions to projects building and enhancing the OSS and digital public goods.

Objectives

  • Support projects contributing to the OSS and Web3 ecosystems
  • Encourage wider community involvement through donations to projects, using donation volume as an indicator of engagement
  • Foster innovation and development within various segments of the OSS ecosystem

Program Philosophy

Collaborative Approach

We encourage projects that seek to complement and enhance existing initiatives rather than competing directly against them. The success of this round is viewed as a collective achievement, benefiting the entire OSS ecosystem.

Long-term Vision

We value projects demonstrating a commitment to sustained impact and growth within the OSS ecosystem. This round may be part of a series of recurring funding opportunities, and projects showing long-term potential will be well-positioned for future support.

Community-Driven Success

The collaborative nature and positive community engagement in this round will influence the planning of future funding opportunities.

General Eligibility Criteria

Ethical and Community Standards

  • No Hateful Content: We firmly stand against discrimination and hate speech.
  • Deceiving Users: Prohibited is any content that could harm users or lead to unintended consequences.
  • Falsification: Attempts to falsify contributions, including Sybil attacks or other manipulative practices, are strictly banned.
  • Fraud & Impersonation: Projects must accurately represent their affiliation and intentions to maintain transparency and trust.
  • No Quid Pro Quo & Bribery: Incentives in exchange for donations are disallowed, maintaining the integrity of the contribution process. For this round, we will follow Gitcoin’s standard for QPQ.
  • Advertising Restrictions: Utilizing grants for direct promotional activities or sales is prohibited.
  • Funding Caps: Projects with significant external funding may be reconsidered to ensure equitable distribution of resources.
  • Legal Compliance: Mandatory compliance with all applicable laws and regulations for participation.
  • Positive Community Interaction: Projects are expected to maintain a supportive attitude towards other participants, contributing to a collaborative and constructive funding environment.

Open-Source Principles and Project Activity

  • Licensing Requirement:
    • Projects must be fully open source, offering “source available” for anyone to fork, modify, and redistribute.
    • All project repositories must utilize permissive licenses. Projects with non-permissive licenses undergo a manual review to ensure they still meet our open-source standards.
  • Activity Metrics:
    • Projects are expected to demonstrate established and ongoing development activity, indicated by meeting at least three of the following criteria:
      • A first commit more than 90 days prior
      • A recent commit within the last 30 days
      • Activity on more than 20 days in the previous 90 days
      • Contributions from more than one individual
    • Projects that only meet two of these criteria will receive a manual review, whereas those failing to meet at least two criteria are deemed ineligible.

GG22 OSS Rounds

GG22 will feature four funding rounds within Grants Stack, each with its own focus and eligibility criteria:

  1. Hackathon Alumni
  2. Applications
  3. Web3 Infrastructure
  4. Developer Tooling and Libraries

Allocations

  • Hackathon Alumni: $100,000
  • Applications: $300,000
  • Web3 Infrastructure: $300,000
  • Developer Tooling and Libraries: $300,000

Applicants are limited to submitting their projects for a single round of funding. It is recommended that grantees choose the round that most closely matches their project’s primary mission and goals. By doing so, we aim to provide focused and impactful support and ensure resources are directed where they can achieve the greatest effect.

Round-Specific Criteria

1. Hackathon Alumni

Objective: To nurture and support projects that originated in recent hackathons and have shown potential for significant contribution to the OSS community.

Round-Specific Criteria:

  • Have participated in a recognized hackathon in the last 18 months
  • Provide evidence of development progress post-hackathon
  • Have a link to a Hackathon project page
  • Must provide proof of participation in a hackathon in the last 18 months where what was produced aligns with Open-Source Principles and Project Activity criteria

2. dApps & Apps

Objective: To accelerate the development and adoption of Applications that offer novel utilities or services, particularly those addressing unmet needs within the ecosystem.

Target Areas for Funding:

  • User Experience and Interface Design
  • Financial Inclusion
  • Educational and Onboarding Tools
  • Social Impact Applications

Round-Specific Criteria:

  • Demonstrate user-centric design and functionality
  • Show contribution to ecosystem growth
  • Present innovation in application use cases

3. Web3 Infrastructure

Objective: To strengthen the Ethereum ecosystem’s foundational infrastructure by supporting projects crucial for its development, scalability, and security.

Target Areas for Funding:

  • Core Client Teams & Development
  • Staking Infrastructure and Diversity
  • Decentralized Identity and Cross-Layer Solutions
  • Security and Scalability Innovations
  • Wallet Security and Privacy Technologies
  • Standardization and Future-Proofing

Round-Specific Criteria:

  • Demonstrate significant contribution to the Ethereum network’s infrastructure
  • Show engagement in pioneering development, particularly in enhancing privacy, interoperability, and user experience

4. Developer Tooling and Libraries

Objective: To support the development of tools and libraries that empower developers to build more efficiently and effectively within the OSS and Web3 ecosystems.

Target Areas for Funding:

  • Development Frameworks and Environments
  • Interoperability Tools
  • Smart Contract Libraries
  • Data Analytics and Visualization Tools

Round-Specific Criteria:

  • Demonstrate how tools, libraries, or frameworks significantly reduce development barriers, improve efficiency, or enhance the security of Web3 projects
  • Show support and usage within the developer community

Evaluation Process

Our evaluation process combines quantitative measures, such as adherence to open-source licensing and active development indicators, with qualitative assessments, including the project’s contribution to the OSS ecosystem, community engagement, and innovation.

Conclusion

This eligibility framework for GG22 OSS funding rounds is designed to nurture various projects across development stages and focus areas within the open-source ecosystem. By establishing clear criteria, we aim to encourage sustained contributions, enhance community engagement, and ensure a transparent and inclusive selection process, fostering growth and innovation within the OSS ecosystem.

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Gearing up for the round! Can’t wait to participate

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Great initiative, thank you for your hard work on this. Are design-focused projects also eligible? For example, we are working on an Open Design Guide (opendesign.guide), which is meant to be an onramp for designers into the open-source ecosystem. The project is fully open-source and built in public. It’s of course harder to track, since design and content contributors often don’t commit all their work in Github, but in various shared documents, design tools, etc. Nonetheless, all these projects need good design, and designers who do that work (or it’s going to be hard for most people to use them). Just curious, thanks for letting me know.

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I find these metrics weak / incomplete. Enough to update the readme.md for the purpose of the GG22 and 3 out of 4 is already accomplished.

No manual review? $1M in matching funds (tweet) is a serious number:

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I would like to participate in this Web3 fundraising festival :tada:

I would like to apply with a hackathon project, single commit to readme.md makes it automatically 3 ouf of 4 and no manual review, but it doesn’t feel right. It is not morally OK in my book, I think that the hackathon round (and other rounds) should promote projects that are actively developed. In fact, I genuinely believe that 20 days with commits should be the baseline rule.

Or maybe I should apply anyway and highlight in the grant application which features I intend to develop. A financial lifeline allowing to focus on a project, without worrying about other, legacy, traditional sources of income such as job. It would be a great honour and privilege to continue working on open source public goods.

Question about roadmaps:

  • grant application is more like a legal contract?
  • grant application is more like sales and marketing?

About roadmaps and what already has been done:

Raising this question / requst for clarification due to by real-life experience with 2-of-2 multisig and what I call “conflict transformation” (CT). Usually DDD (discussions, debated, disputes) are net negative, I decided to CT and make it net positive.

DeSci experiment about “default assumptions”: https://forms.gle/3ESySd3o7DmzuK5d6

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(check it out it, is worth your time, you can also join @IndependentTribunal on Telegram)

Bring me onboard as a juror / evaluator

Good cop: I can be helpful, supportive, offer loads of solicited / unsolicited advice, review the projects to see what is out there and connect different parts of the ecosystem

Bad cop: I can be obsesive, pedantic, autistic, find holes, ensuring only Kosher Halal top-notch projects are entrusted with admission. Or maybe it’s not the place for gatekeeping, it will be QF and popularity contest to decide?

Objective cop: I also represent ImpactEvaluation.Foundation (IEF). We are a fresh project with massive vision. It would be greatly beneficial for me personally and for us as organinisation to gain some experience in reviewing the projects.

Can be as volunteer, can be as minimal wage, can be at 75-80% of the hourly rate paid to the team / contractors / consultants, can as “pay it forward” focusing on adding value to the entire ecosystem.

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Sorry for the late response! And thank you for the question. So do be eligible for any OSS round, you need an active repository that is actively managed. If you don’t have that right now, I would suggest that you start maintaining one so that you’re ready for when the next round goes live!

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[UPDATE]: Added this back into the eligibility, as it was unfortunately missing.

As per our usual eligibility within the OSS Program, projects can only apply to one OSS round (see GG20 Eligibility here). This will always remain the same and never change. Apologies if this has caused confusion for anyone!

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Please clarify the wording / intention of the rule. CC @MathildaDV :eyes:

There will be a crunch time soon, many projects will apply last minute… The ROI will be higher if you onboard me now.

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10+ feedbacks here:

(I really enjoy smart defaults and making things simple, less thinking)

10+ feedbacks on Github.

It would be genuine value add for the projects if reviewers were providing some useful feedback. Insane ROI on time, especially that :brain: processing have been done already in order to YES / NO the eligibility.

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Gitcoin Grants uses Gitcoin Checker as a tool to make the process transparent, this is a public resource that makes feedback public by default. The feedback on Gitcoin operated Rounds is based on the criteria set for the rounds.

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This is public information that you can freely browse.

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Checker is a nice tool.

I remember some time ago it provided YES / NO / maybe indication whether my project meets the eligibility criteria. After the application though - based on that my perception is that it mostly helps the reviewers / round operators.

I used the word “feedback” in a different context. An example prompt for human intelligence:

Imagine you are Gitcoin Core / Community Council reviewing grant application to GG22. You are a trusted member of the community with broad knowledge of the Web3 / Regen / OSS ecosystem.

As you put some effort into reviewing the application, website, test driving the product, Twitter, GitHub you attain a good understanding of what the project is all about.

You want project to succeed, accomplish scale, become economically sustainable beyond grant money and “make world a better place” (such a cliche).

Please be honest, direct, precise, to the point. There are many projects to review, so do not overthink, only if something jumps to your mind.

I see no downside. There is ROI on human intelligence.

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I respect your perception, but the information is public (this was your original concern) and reviewers aim to provide neutral feedback about the grant proposal based on the criteria.

Gitcoin Checker was built (from my POV) to help Operators, Reviewers, Grantees, Stakeholders, Community Members, Researchers, and everyone that may find this data useful.

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Of course the information in the checker is public. That was never a concern, that was never the “original” concern (additional qualifying word).

When writing “after the application though” - I meant my personal use case - dealing with the appeal process. The checker wasn’t in my flow during the grant editing or round application, only after the application was final.

And then explained in the human intelligence prompt what type of feedback I mean.

I think it is worth highlighting the difference:

  • human intelligence feedback
  • AI checker feedback base on the criteria

Dropping alpha. Meta-rule: changing rules.

Something that observed during GG22:

It made me reflect about game-theory of changing rules. It works only once, then the element of surprise is gone and by default you assume that the rules are changing.

GG22 for active projects, not zombies that updated readme.md

That should be a baseline acceptance criterium.

:five: Another criterium that is not covered: amount of issues opened by the amount of different GitHub users.

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(of course not the only metric, part of comprehensive suite of metrics to weed out zombie projects)

:six: Community size and activity: amount of Twitter reactions and Telegram messages.

(analytics is unlikely to be public, Web3 projects are privacy orientated, but the traffic on Twitter / Telegram / Discord / Reddit is a decent proxy for the user base)

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If the feedback comes before you apply to a round then you’re talking about a “Consultation” about your project and this is not the role of Reviewers in a Grants Program.

Gitcoin Checker provides both, take a look.

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Thank you for sharing @MathildaDV

I am trying to get in an application for Unlock Protocol since I am Lead Steward over there. We are trying to apply for probably two different matching funds since a lot has happened over at Unlock.

One I was trying to apply for today is the OSS Developer Tooling and Libraries one. I get on the following link (/oss-developer-tooling-libraries) but end up on the application form for “dApps and Apps.”

Can you help me navigate the correct link please :pray:

Best
Stella*

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Hi @stellaachenbach! If you head to grants.gitcoin.co, and head to the Dev Tooling round there, you should have no problem accessing the round you’re trying to apply to! I just tested it. If you still have issues, let me know!

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“two different” and “single” emphasis mine

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It’s possible that @stellaachenbach is applying for an OSS round as well as a Community Round, which anyone is welcome to do. But yes, one can only apply to one OSS round per project, but you can apply to as many Community Rounds as you wish.

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Thank you again for your help here @MathildaDV !
We just had our weekly DAO call and Unlock Labs would want to apply for Apps and Dapps while Unlock DAO would like to apply for Tooling and Libraries. I know you said double OSS is not an option but was wondering if this still applies to different entities? Just wanting to make sure so we can act according to the rules and thank you again for your time!

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You’re applying under two different entities so that is totally fine! Thank you for checking :slight_smile: Excited to see your applications come in!

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Unsolicited advice / feedback from an user :innocent:

Hackathon alumni round. Application has some interesting / valuable / useful questions. As a user of Gitcoin I’m genuinely interested in knowing these, but they are hidden:

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Specifically this one:

Describe the progress and development of your project since the hackathon. What milestones have you achieved?

Maybe possible to make them public? That will enable “wisdom of the crowds” QF more easier. Without knowing answers to these question it would require energy for research (wasted effort, data was already provided) or “popularity contest”.

2nd piece of unsolicited advice was meant to be communication but now I see:

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Source: https://x.com/gitcoin/status/1847015772062658674

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Source: https://x.com/gitcoin/status/1848393787543892115

That is the reason for keeping the smarts contracts open! Deadline enforcement on the human level.

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